American Book Award
Encyclopedia
The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation
Before Columbus Foundation
The Before Columbus Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1976 by Ishmael Reed, Victor Hernández Cruz, Shawn Wong and Rudolfo Anaya to be "a multi-ethnic organizing dedicated to promoting a pan-cultural view of America," especially through the promotion of multicultural writers.One of...

. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors
American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...

, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre. This should not be confused with the National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...

s which operated under the same nomenclature, American Book Award, between 1980 and 1986 when both organizations gave out different awards under the same name.

1980s

1980
  • Douglas Woolf
    Douglas Woolf
    Douglas Woolf was an American author of short stories, novels and book reviews.Woolf studied at Harvard University from 1939 until 1942...

     for Future preconditional: A collection
  • Edward Dorn for Hello, La Jolla
  • Jayne Cortez
    Jayne Cortez
    Jayne Cortez is an American poet, and performance artist.-Biography:She grew up in California. She is the author of ten books of poems and performer of her poetry with music on nine recordings. Her voice is celebrated for its political, surrealistic, dynamic innovations in lyricism, and visceral...

     for Mouth on Paper
  • Leslie Marmon Silko
    Leslie Marmon Silko
    Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance...

     for Ceremony
    Ceremony (Silko novel)
    Ceremony is a novel by Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko, first published by Penguin in 1977.The story documents the troubles of Tayo, a half-white, half-Laguna Indian, as he struggles to cope with returning to traditional Native American society after surviving the Bataan Death March of...

  • Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
    Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
    Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is a contemporary poet. Winner of two American Book Awards, her work is often associated with the Language School, the poetry of the New York School, phenomenology, and visual art...

     for Random Possession
  • Milton Murayama
    Milton Murayama
    Milton Murayama is an American Nisei novelist and playwright. His first novel, All I Asking for Is My Body is considered a classic novel of the experiences of Japanese Americans in Hawaii before and during World War II.-Biography:Murayama was born in Maui, Hawaii to Japanese immigrant parents...

     for All I Asking for Is My Body
  • Quincy Troupe
    Quincy Troupe
    Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr., , is a poet, editor, journalist-Early life:The son of Negro League baseball catcher Quincy Trouppe , Troupe Jr. attended Grambling State University on a baseball scholarship...

     for Snake Back Solos
  • Rudolfo Anaya
    Rudolfo Anaya
    Rudolfo Anaya is an Mexican-American author. Best known for his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, Anaya is considered one of the founders of the canon of contemporary Chicano literature.- Biography :...

     for Tortuga: A Novel


1981
  • Alta
    Alta (poet)
    Alta is an American poet, prose writer, and publisher.-Life:Alta started Shameless Hussy Press in 1968. The first women-owned feminist press in California, it published over 40 books in the twenty years Alta operated it, from 1969 to 1989...

     for Shameless Hussy
  • Alan Chong Lau
    Alan Chong Lau
    Alan Chong Lau is an American poet, and artist.-Life:He grew up in Paradise, California, and graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a B.A...

     for Songs for Jadina
  • Bienvenido N. Santos for Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories
  • Helen Adam
    Helen Adam
    Helen Adam was a Scottish poet, collagist and photographer who was an active participant in The San Francisco Renaissance, a literary movement contemporaneous to the Beat Generation that occurred in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s...

     for Turn Again to Me & Other Poems
  • Lionel Mitchell for Traveling Light
  • Miguel Algarín
    Miguel Algarín
    Miguel Algarín , is a Puerto Rican poet, writer, co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café, and retired Rutgers University professor of English.-Early years:...

     for On Call
  • Nicholasa Mohr
    Nicholasa Mohr
    Nicholasa Mohr is one of the best known Nuyorican writers. Her works tell of growing up in the Puerto Rican communities of the Bronx and El Barrio and of the difficulties Puerto Rican women face in the United States.- Life and career :...

     for Felita
  • Peter Blue Cloud
    Peter Blue Cloud
    Peter Blue Cloud was a Mohawk poet, and folklorist.-Life:He was born on the Caughnawaga Reserve in Kahnawake, Quebec, Canada and died in Montreal on April 27, 2011....

     for Back Then Tomorrow
  • Robert Kelly
    Robert Kelly (poet)
    Robert Kelly is an American poet associated with the deep image group.-Early life and education:Kelly was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Jason and Margaret Rose Kelly née Kane, in 1935. He did his undergraduate studies at the City College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1955...

     for The Time of Voice: Poems 1994-1996
  • Rose Drachler for The Choice
  • Susan Howe
    Susan Howe
    Susan Howe is a American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among others poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre...

     for The Liberties
  • Toni Cade Bambara
    Toni Cade Bambara
    Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.- Biography :...

     for The Salt Eaters
    Salt Eaters
    The Salt Eaters is a 1980 novel, the first such work by Toni Cade Bambara. The novel is written in an experimental style and is explicitly political in tone, with several of the characters being veterans of the civil rights, feminist, and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s...



1982
  • Al Young
    Al Young
    Al Young is an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor. On May 15, 2005 he was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In appointing Young as Poet Laureate, the Governor praised him: "He is an educator and a man with a passion for the Arts...

     for Bodies and Soul
  • Duane Niatum
    Duane Niatum
    -Life:After his parent's divorce, his Klallam grandfather became his surrogate father.After serving in the Navy, he graduated from the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University with a M.A., and the University of Michigan with a Ph.D...

     for Songs for the Harvester of Dreams: Poems
  • E. L. Mayo
    E. L. Mayo
    Edward Leslie Mayo was an American poet.-Life:He attended schools in Malden, Massachusetts, then Bates College in Lewiston, Maine....

     for Collected Poems E L Mayo
  • Frank Chin
    Frank Chin
    Frank Chin is an American author and playwright.- Life and career :Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California, but was raised to the age of six by a retired Vaudeville couple in Placerville, California. At six his mother brought him back to the San Francisco Bay Area to live in Oakland Chinatown...

     for The Chickencoop Chinaman
    The Chickencoop Chinaman
    The Chickencoop Chinaman is a 1972 play by Frank Chin. It was the first play by an Asian American to have a major New York production.-Story:...

     and The Year of the Dragon
    The Year of the Dragon (play)
    The Year of the Dragon is the best-known play by Frank Chin, the first Asian American playwright to be produced on a mainstream New York stage...

  • Hilton Obenzinger
    Hilton Obenzinger
    Hilton Obenzinger is an American novelist, poet, history and criticism writer.-Life:He was raised in Queens, and graduated from Columbia University in 1969 and from Stanford University with a Ph.D. in 1997. He was active in the Columbia University protests of 1968...

     for This Passover or the next, I will never be in Jerusalem
  • Him Mark Lai
    Him Mark Lai
    Him Mark Lai was an American historian. He was known as the “Dean of Chinese American History” by his academic peers, despite the fact that he was professionally trained as a mechanical engineer with no advanced training in the academic field of History.-Life:Him Mark Lai co-taught the first...

    , Genny Lim
    Genny Lim
    Genny Lim is an American poet, playwright, and performer.-Life:She graduated from San Francisco State University, and from Columbia University in 1973.She teaches at the New College of California....

    , Judy Yung
    Judy Yung
    Judy Yung is professor emerita in American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in oral history, women's history, and Chinese American and Asian American history.-Life:...

     for Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940
  • Jerome Rothenberg
    Jerome Rothenberg
    Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...

     for Pre-Faces and Other Writings
  • Joyce Carol Thomas
    Joyce Carol Thomas
    Joyce Carol Thomas is an African-American poet, playwright, motivational speaker, and best-selling author of more than 30 children's books. She was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma and currently resides in Berkeley, California. She moved with her family in 1948 to Tracy, California. Thomas received a...

     for Marked by Fire
    Marked by Fire
    Marked by Fire is a 1982 novel by Joyce Carol Thomas that won the United States 1983 National Book Award. The story follows the life of Abyssinia "Abby" Jackson, whose home in Oklahoma is destroyed by a tornado and fire....

  • Leroy Quintana
    Leroy Quintana
    Leroy V. Quintana is an American poet, and Vietnam Veteran.-Life:He was raised in small northern New Mexico towns such as Ratón and Questa.He was drafted in 1967, and served in the 101st Airborne Division....

     for Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets
  • Lorna Dee Cervantes
    Lorna Dee Cervantes
    Lorna Dee Cervantes is an award-winning Chicana-Native American poet who is considered one of the major Chicana poets of the past 40 years. She has been described by Alurista, as "probably the best Chicana poet active today." Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in 1954 in California. She grew up in San...

     for Emplumada
  • Ronald Phillip Tanaka
    Ronald Phillip Tanaka
    -Life:He was a Sansei , born in the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona in 1944 behind barbed wire.He graduated from Pomona College, from the University of California, Berkley with a Ph.D...

     for The Shino Suite: Japanese-American Poetry
  • Russell Banks
    Russell Banks
    Russell Banks is an American writer of fiction and poetry.- Biography :Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in upstate New York, and has been named a New York State Author. He is also...

     for Book of Jamaica
  • Tato Laviera
    Tato Laviera
    Tato Laviera is a Nuyorican poet. Born in Puerto Rico, he moved to New York City with his family in 1960.Laviera's poetry, which is written sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English, more often in Spanglish, addresses language, cultural identity, race, and memory, particularly as it affects the...

     for Enclave


1983
  • Barbara Christian
    Barbara Christian
    Barbara Christian was an author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley...

     for Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976
  • Cecilia Liang for Chinese Folk Poetry
  • Evangelina Vigil-Piñón
    Evangelina Vigil-Piñón
    Evangelina Vigil-Piñón is a Mexican-American poet, translator, and television personality.-Life:She studied at Prairie View A&M University.She graduated from University of Houston. She studied at St...

     for Thirty: An' Seen a Lot
  • Harriet Rohmer for Legend of Food Mountain: LA Montana Del Alimento
  • James D. Houston
    James D. Houston
    James Dudley Houston was an American novelist. He wrote nine novels in total.Houston was born in San Francisco, where his parents had migrated from Quanah, Texas, a small town near Oklahoma...

     for Californians: Searching for the Golden State
  • Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn for Pet food & tropical apparitions
  • John A. Williams for Click Song: A Novel
  • Joy Kogawa
    Joy Kogawa
    Joy Nozomi Kogawa, CM, OBC is a Canadian poet and novelist of Japanese descent.-Life:Born Joy Nozomi Nakayama in Vancouver, British Columbia, she was sent with her family to the internment camp for Japanese Canadians at Slocan during World War II...

     for Obasan
    Obasan
    Obasan is a novel by the Japanese-Canadian author Joy Kogawa. First published by Lester and Orpen Dennys in 1981, it chronicles Canada's internment and persecution of its citizens of Japanese descent during World War II from the perspective of a young child...

  • Judy Grahn
    Judy Grahn
    Judy Rae Grahn is an American poet. She has written many lesbian / feminist works.-Activities:Judy Grahn is a poet who writes about women's lives, including lesbian experience. She was a member of the Gay Women's Liberation Group, the first lesbian feminist collective on the west coast, founded...

     for The Queen of Wands: Poetry
  • Nash Candelaria
    Nash Candelaria
    Nash Candelaria is a Mexican American novelist. He is known for a tetralogy of novels about the Rafa family. He has been called the "historical novelist of the Hispanic people of New Mexico."-Early life:...

     for Not by the Sword
  • Peter Guralnick
    Peter Guralnick
    Peter Guralnick is an American music critic, writer on music, and historian of US American popular music, who is also active as an author and screenwriter. He has been married for over 45 years to Alexandra...

     for Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians
  • Seán Ó Tuama
    Seán Ó Tuama
    Seán Ó Tuama was an Irish poet, playwright and academic.-Life:Raised in Cork city and educated at the North Monastery school and University College Cork, Ó Tuama first came to prominence in 1950 with his anthology of modern Irish language poetry titled Nuabhéarsaíocht 1939-1949.Notable academic...

     for An Duanaire Sixteen Hundred to Nineteen Hundred: Poems of the Dispossessed


1984
  • Cecil Brown
    Cecil Brown
    Cecil Brown was the author of the book Suez to Singapore, which describes the sinking of HMS Repulse in December 1941. He also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6410 Hollywood Blvd. for his contribution to radio.. He was a war correspondent who worked closely with Edward R...

     for Days Without Weather
  • Gary Snyder
    Gary Snyder
    Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...

     for Axe Handles: Poems
  • Howard Schwartz
    Howard Schwartz (writer and editor)
    Howard Schwartz is a widely regarded folklorist, author, poet, and editor of dozens of books. He has won the international Koret Jewish Book Award, for the book Before You Were Born, and won the 2005 National Jewish Book Award for Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism...

    , Mark Podwal
    Mark Podwal
    Mark Podwal is an artist, author and physician. He may be best known for his drawings on The New York Times OP-ED page. In addition, he is the author and illustrator of books for children as well as for adults. Most of these works — Podwal's own as well as those he has illustrated for...

     for The Captive Soul of the Messiah: New Tales About Reb Nachman
  • Imamu Amiri Baraka for Anthology of African American Women: Confirmation Men
  • Jesús Colón
    Jesús Colón
    Jesús Colón was a Puerto Rican writer known as the Father of the Nuyorican Movement.-Early years:Colón was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War when the American Tobacco Company gained control of most of the tobacco producing land in Puerto Rico. His father was a baker and his...

     for A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches
  • Joseph Bruchac
    Joseph Bruchac
    Joseph Bruchac is a writer of books relating to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a particular focus on northeastern Native American and Anglo-American lives and folklore. He has published works of poetry, novels, and short stories. He is from Saratoga Springs, New York, and is of...

     for Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets
  • Maurice Kenny for The Mama Poems
  • Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
    Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
    Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is a contemporary poet. Winner of two American Book Awards, her work is often associated with the Language School, the poetry of the New York School, phenomenology, and visual art...

     for The heat bird
  • Miné Okubo
    Miné Okubo
    Miné Okubo , a pioneering Nisei woman, artist and writer, created approximately 2000 drawings and sketches of her experiences while confined along with approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans in US internment camps following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor...

     for Citizen 13660
  • Paule Marshall
    Paule Marshall
    Paule Marshall is an American author. She was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn to Barbadian parents and educated at Girls High School, Brooklyn College and Hunter College . Early in her career, she wrote poetry, but later returned to prose...

     for Praisesong for the Widow
    Praisesong for the Widow
    Praisesong for the Widow is a novel by Paule Marshall which takes place in the mid seventies, chronicling the life of Avey Johnson, a sixty-four year old African American widow on a physical and emotional journey in the Caribbean island of Carriacou...

  • Ruthanne Lum McCunn
    Ruthanne Lum McCunn
    Ruthanne Lum McCunn is an American novelist and editor of Chinese and Scottish descent.-Life:She was raised in Hong Kong.She graduated from University of Texas, in 1968....

    , You-shan Tang, Ellen Lai-shan Yeung for Pie-Biter
  • Thomas McGrath
    Thomas McGrath (poet)
    Thomas Matthew McGrath, was a celebrated American poet....

     for Echoes inside the labyrinth
  • Venkatesh Kulkarni
    Venkatesh Kulkarni
    Venkatesh Srinivas Kulkarni was an American novelist and academic.-Life:He graduated from Osmania University, with a master's degree by the age of 19...

     for Naked in Deccan
  • William J. Kennedy for O Albany!


1985
  • Angela Jackson
    Angela Jackson
    Angela Jackson is a poet, playwright and writer.-Life:Her father, George Jackson, Sr. and mother, Angeline Robinson Jackson moved to Chicago...

     for Solo in the Box Car Third Floor E
  • Arnold Genthe
    Arnold Genthe
    Arnold Genthe was a photographer, best known for his photos of San Francisco's Chinatown, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and his portraits of noted persons, from politicians and socialites to literary figures and entertainment celebrities.-Biography:Genthe was born in Berlin, Prussia, to Louise...

    , John Kuo Wei Tchen for Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown
  • Colleen J. McElroy
    Colleen J. McElroy
    Colleen J. McElroy is an American poet, short story writer, editor, memoirist.-Life:She graduated from Kansas State University and from the University of Washington with a Ph.D...

     for Queen of the Ebony Isles
  • Gary Soto
    Gary Soto
    Gary Soto is a Mexican-American author and poet.Mexican-American parents Manuel and Angie Soto . In his youth, he worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley and in factories in Fresno. Gary's father died in 1957, when he was just five years old...

     for Living Up The Street
    Living Up the Street
    Living up the Street is a book written by Gary Soto. It was published in 1985. The book is a collection of short stories, recollections of growing up Chicano in Fresno, California...

  • Peter Irons for Justice at War
  • Keiho Soga
    Keiho Soga
    Yatsutaro Soga was a Hawaiian Issei journalist, and poet.-Life:In 1896, he immigrated to Hawai'i.He was a reporter for Hawaii Shimpo....

    , Taisanboku Mori, Sojin Takei, Muin Ozaki for Poets Behind Barbed Wire
  • Louise Erdrich
    Louise Erdrich
    Karen Louise Erdrich, known as Louise Erdrich, is an author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American heritage. She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance...

     for Love Medicine: A Novel
    Love Medicine
    Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich’s first novel, published in 1984. Erdrich revised and expanded the novel for an edition issued in 1993, and this version was considered the definitive edition until 2009 when Erdrich re-edited it...

  • Maureen Owen
    Maureen Owen
    Maureen Owen is an American poet, editor, and biographer.-Life:Owen trained horses in her youth and traveled in the Racing Fair Circuit along with her family. They lived in California during winters. Owen attended Seattle University and San Francisco State University. In 1965, she moved to Japan,...

     for Amelia Earhart
  • May Sarton
    May Sarton
    May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton , an American poet, novelist, and memoirist.-Biography:...

     for At Seventy: A Journal
  • Robert Edward Duncan for Ground Work: Before the War
  • Ron Jones
    Ron Jones (teacher)
    Ron Jones is an American writer, and teacher in Palo Alto, California, and San Francisco, California. He started The Third Wave...

     for Say Ray
  • Sandra Cisneros
    Sandra Cisneros
    Sandra Cisneros is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Street and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories...

     for The House on Mango Street
    The House on Mango Street
    The House on Mango Street is a coming-of-age novel by Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros, published in 1984. It deals with a young Latina girl, Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago with Chicanos and Puerto Ricans. Esperanza is determined to "say goodbye" to her impoverished Latino...

  • Sonia Sanchez
    Sonia Sanchez
    Sonia Sanchez is an African American poet most often associated with the Black Arts Movement. She has authored over a dozen books of poetry, as well as plays and children's books...

     for Homegirls and Handgrenades
  • William Oandasan
    William Oandasan
    William Oandasan was an American poet, journalist, editor, and publisher. He was born on the Round Valley Reservation in Northern California, to Yuki tribe and Filipino parents.-Life:...

     for Round Valley Songs


1986
  • Anna Lee Walters
    Anna Lee Walters
    Anna Lee Walters is an award-winning Pawnee/Otoe-Missouria author from Oklahoma.-Career:Walters works at the Diné College in Arizona, where she directs the college press. She lives in Tsaile, Arizona with her husband Harry Walters...

     for The Sun Is Not Merciful: Short Stories
  • Cherríe Moraga
    Cherríe Moraga
    Cherríe L. Moraga is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright.-Biography:Moraga was born in Whittier, California. She earned her Bachelor's degree from Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, California and her Master's from San Francisco State University in 1980...

    , Gloria Anzaldúa for This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
    This Bridge Called My Back
    This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color is a feminist anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. The anthology was first published in 1981 by Persephone Press, and the second edition was published in 1984 by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press...

  • Helen Barolini
    Helen Barolini
    Helen Barolini is an American author, born in Syracuse, New York. She married Antonio Barolini, an Italian poet, and lives outside New York City.She has been included in Best American Essays for 1991 and 1993...

     for The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian American Women
  • Jeff Hannusch for I Hear You Knockin : The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues
  • Linda Hogan
    Linda Hogan (writer)
    Linda K. Hogan is a Native American poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories.She is currently the Chickasaw Nation's Writer in Residence.-Early life:Linda Hogan is Chickasaw...

     for Seeing Through the Sun
  • Miguel Algarín
    Miguel Algarín
    Miguel Algarín , is a Puerto Rican poet, writer, co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café, and retired Rutgers University professor of English.-Early years:...

     for Time's Now/Ya Es Tiempo
  • Natasha Borovsky
    Natasha Borovsky
    Natasha Borovsky is a Russian American poet and novelist.-Life:Her father, Alexander Borovsky, was a Russian pianist and her mother, Maria Sila-Nowicki, was of noble Polish and Russian descent....

     for A Daughter of the Nobility
  • Raymond Federman
    Raymond Federman
    Raymond Federman was a French–American novelist and academic, known also for poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. He held positions at the University at Buffalo from 1973 to 1999, when he was appointed Distinguished Emeritus Professor. Federman was a writer in the experimental style, one...

     for Smiles on Washington Square: A Love Story of Sorts
  • Susan Howe
    Susan Howe
    Susan Howe is a American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among others poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre...

     for My Emily Dickinson
  • Terence Winch
    Terence Winch
    -Biography:Terence Patrick Winch was born in New York City in 1945. He grew up in an Irish neighborhood in the Bronx, the child of Irish immigrants. In 1971, he moved to Washington, DC, where he became involved with the Mass Transit readings in Dupont Circle. He published the first issue of Mass...

     for Irish Musicians/American Friends
  • Toshio Mori
    Toshio Mori
    Toshio Mori is an American author, best known for being one of the earliest Japanese American writers to publish a book of fiction.-Biography:...

     for Yokohama, California


1987
  • Ai
    Ai (poet)
    Florence Anthony was a National Book Award winning American poet and educator who legally changed her name to Ai Ogawa...

     for SIN
  • Ana Castillo
    Ana Castillo
    Ana Castillo is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, and essayist.- Life and career :Castillo was born and raised in an inner city barrio of Chicago, Illinois. After completing undergraduate studies, she immediately began teaching college courses...

     for The Mixquiahuala Letters
  • Cyn Zarco for Circumnavigations
  • Daniel McGuire for Portrait of Little Boy in darkness
  • Dorothy Bryant
    Dorothy Bryant
    Dorothy Bryant is an American novelist, playwright, essayist and feminist writer.Bryant is known for her mystical, feminist and fantastic novels and plays that traverse the space between the real world and her character's inner psyche or soul...

     for Confessions of Madame Psyche: Memoirs and Letters of Mei-Li Murrow
  • Etheridge Knight
    Etheridge Knight
    Etheridge Knight was an African-American poet who became a notable poet in 1968 with his debut volume, Poems from Prison. The book recalls in verse his eight-year-long sentence after Etheridge was arrested for robbery in 1960...

     for The Essential Etheridge Knight
  • Gary Giddins
    Gary Giddins
    Gary Giddins is an American jazz critic, author, and director, best known for his longtime work with The Village Voice. Born in Brooklyn, and raised on Long Island, Giddins graduated from Grinnell College, Iowa, in 1970...

     for Celebrating Bird: The Triumph Of Charlie Parker
  • Harvey Pekar
    Harvey Pekar
    Harvey Lawrence Pekar was an American underground comic book writer, music critic and media personality, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor comic series. In 2003, the series inspired a critically acclaimed film adaptation of the same name.Pekar described American Splendor as "an...

     for The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland
  • James Welch for Fools Crow
    Fools Crow
    Fools Crow is a novel written by author James Welch. Set in Montana shortly after the Civil War, this novel tells of Fools Crow, a young Blackfoot Indian on the verge of manhood, and his tribe, known as the Lone Eaters. The invasion of white society threatens to change their traditional way of...

  • John Wieners
    John Wieners
    John Joseph Wieners was an American lyric poet.-Biography:Born in Milton, Massachusetts, Wieners attended St. Gregory Elementary School in Dorchester, Massachusetts and Boston College High School. From 1950 to 1954, he studied at Boston College, where he earned his A.B...

     for Selected Poems: 1958-1984
  • Juan Felipe Herrera
    Juan Felipe Herrera
    Juan Felipe Herrera is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist.The only son of María de la Luz Quintana and Felipe Emilio Herrera, the three were campesinos living from crop to crop, and from tractor to trailer to tents on the roads of the San Joaquín Valley, Southern...

     for Face Games
  • Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum
    Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum
    -Life:She graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. She was a Clayman Institute scholar at Stanford University.She teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco.-External links:***...

     for liberazione della donna: feminism in Italy
  • Michael Mayo
    Michael Mayo
    -Life:He studied at the University of Maine, University of New Brunswick, and the University of Delaware. He lived for ten years in San Francisco. Since 1993, he has lived in Puerto Vallarta.-External links:...

     for Practicing Angels: A Contemporary Anthology of San Francisco Bay Area Poetry
  • Septima Poinsette Clark
    Septima Poinsette Clark
    Septima Poinsette Clark was an American educator and civil rights activist. Clark developed the literacy and citizenship workshops that played an important role in the drive for voting rights and civil rights for African Americans in the American Civil Rights Movement." She became known as the...

    , Cynthia Stokes Brown
    Cynthia Stokes Brown
    Cynthia Stokes Brown is an educator-historian. She earned her BA at Duke University in history and her M.A.T. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in the history of education with fellowships from the American Association of University Women and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation...

     for Ready from Within: A First Person Narrative
  • Terry McMillan
    Terry McMillan
    Terry McMillan is an American author. Her interest in books comes from working at a library when she was sixteen. She received her BA in journalism in 1986 at University of California, Berkeley. Her work is characterized by strong female protagonists.Her first book, Mama, was published in 1987...

     for Mama


1988
  • Allison Blakely
    Allison Blakely
    -Life:He graduated from the University of Oregon, and from the University of California, Berkeley with an M.A. and Ph.D.He taught for thirty years at Howard University...

     for Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought
  • Charles Olson
    Charles Olson
    Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...

     for The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems
  • Daisy Bates
    Daisy Bates (civil rights activist)
    Daisy Lee Gatson Bates was an American civil rights activist, publisher and writer who played a leading role in the Little Rock integration crisis of 1957....

     for The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir
  • David Halberstam
    David Halberstam
    David Halberstam was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and historian, known for his early work on the Vietnam War, his work on politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, and his later sports journalism.-Early life and education:Halberstam...

     for The Reckoning
  • Edward Sanders
    Ed Sanders
    Ed Sanders is an American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author and publisher and has been a longtime member of the band The Fugs. He has been called a bridge between the Beat and Hippie generations.-Biography:...

     for Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Poems 1961-1985
  • Gerald Vizenor
    Gerald Vizenor
    Gerald Robert Vizenor is a Native American writer, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. One of the most prolific Native American writers, with over 30 books to his name, Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where...

     for Griever: An American Monkey King in China
    Griever: An American Monkey King in China
    Griever: An American Monkey King in China is a 1986 novel by Gerald Vizenor. It won the 1986 New York Fiction Collective Award and the 1988 American Book Award...

  • Jimmy Santiago Baca
    Jimmy Santiago Baca
    Jimmy Santiago Baca of Apache and Chicano descent is an American poet and writer.- Life and career :...

     for Martin & Meditations on the South Valley
  • Kesho Y. Scott
    Kesho Y. Scott
    Kesho Y. Scott is associate professor of American Studies and Sociology at Grinnell College. She received her M.A. in sociology at the University of Detroit.Before receiving her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa in 1988, she was Iowa Woman of the Year...

    , Cherry Muhanji, Egyirba High for Tight Spaces
  • Marlon K. Hom for Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown
  • Opal Whiteley
    Opal Whiteley
    Opal Whiteley was an American nature writer and diarist whose childhood journal was first published in 1920 as The Story of Opal in serialized form in the Atlantic Monthly, then later that same year as a book with the title The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart.Whiteley's true...

     for The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley
  • Ronald Sukenick
    Ronald Sukenick
    Ronald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.-Life:Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University ....

     for Down and in: Life in the Underground
  • Salvatore La Puma
    Salvatore La Puma
    Salvatore John Giovanni La Puma was an Italian American short story writer.-Life:He was born and raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. In 1951, he was drafted, and served in the Korea War as a medic. In 1959, he moved to Westchester, and worked as an advertising copy editor...

     for The Boys of Bensonhurst
  • Toni Morrison
    Toni Morrison
    Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved...

     for Beloved
    Beloved (novel)
    Beloved is a novel by the American writer Toni Morrison, published in 1987. Set in 1873 just after the American Civil War , it is based on the story of the African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in 1856 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state...

  • Wing Tek Lum
    Wing Tek Lum
    Wing Tek Lum is an American poet. Together with a brother he also manages a family-owned real estate company, Lum Yip Kee, Ltd.-Life:He graduated from Brown University in 1969, where he majored in engineering...

    , Tek Lum Lum for Expounding the Doubtful Points


1989
  • Alma Luz Villanueva
    Alma Luz Villanueva
    Alma Luz Villanueva is a Mexican-American poet, short story writer, and novelist.-Life:Her Mexican grandfather edited a newspaper in Hermosillo, Mexico, and was a published poet...

     for The Ultraviolet Sky
  • Askia M. Touré
    Askia M. Touré
    Askia Muhammad Touré is an African American poet, essayist, political editor, and leading voice of the Black Arts Movement.-Life:...

     for From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance!
  • Audre Lorde
    Audre Lorde
    Audre Lorde was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.-Life:...

     for A Burst of Light
  • Carolyn Lau for Wode Shuofa: My Way of Speaking
  • Emory Elliott
    Emory Elliott
    Emory Elliott was a professor of American literature at UC Riverside.An authority on many topics in literature, Elliott was known in particular for advocating the expansion of the literary canon to include a more diverse range of voices.-Childhood and education:Elliott came from a working-class...

     for Columbia Literary History of the United States
  • Eduardo Galeano
    Eduardo Galeano
    Eduardo Hughes Galeano is a Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist. His best known works are Memoria del fuego and Las venas abiertas de América Latina which have been translated into twenty languages and transcend orthodox genres: combining fiction, journalism, political analysis, and...

     for Genesis
  • Frank Chin
    Frank Chin
    Frank Chin is an American author and playwright.- Life and career :Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California, but was raised to the age of six by a retired Vaudeville couple in Placerville, California. At six his mother brought him back to the San Francisco Bay Area to live in Oakland Chinatown...

     for The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.
  • Henry Louis Gates for The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
    The Signifying Monkey
    The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism is a work of literary criticism and theory by American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. first published in 1988...

  • Isabel Allende
    Isabel Allende
    Isabel Allende Llona is a Chilean writer with American citizenship. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts , which have been commercially successful...

     for Eva Luna
    Eva Luna
    Eva Luna is a novel written by Chilean novelist Isabel Allende in 1985 and translated from Spanish to English by Margaret Sayers Peden.Eva Luna takes us into the life of the eponymous protagonist, an orphan who grows up in an unidentified country in South America...

  • J. California Cooper
    J. California Cooper
    J. California Cooper is an African American playwright and author.Alice Walker has said that "Her style is deceptively simple and direct and the vale of tears in which her characters reside is never so deep that a rich chuckle at a foolish person's foolishness cannot be heard."-Bibliography:* 1984:...

     for Homemade Love
  • Jennifer Stone
    Jennifer Stone
    Jennifer Lindsay Stone is an American actress best known for playing Harper Finkle on the Disney Channel series Wizards of Waverly Place and Harriet Welsh in the Disney Channel film Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars.-Life:...

     for Stone's Throw
  • Josephine Gattuso Hendin
    Josephine Gattuso Hendin
    Josephine Gattuso Hendin is an Italian American feminist novelist and critic.-Life:She grew up in Queens and now lives in Manhattan....

     for The Right Thing to Do
  • Leslie Scalapino
    Leslie Scalapino
    Leslie Scalapino was a United States poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of...

     for way
  • Shuntaro Tanikawa
    Shuntaro Tanikawa
    is a Japanese poet and translator. He is one of the most widely read and highly regarded of living Japanese poets, both in Japan and abroad, and a frequent subject of speculations regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature...

     for Floating the River in Melancholy
  • Charles Fanning
    Charles Fanning
    Charles F. Fanning, Jr. is an American historian, and Irish American academic.-Life:He grew up in Norwood, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard College in 1964, with a master's in 1966, and from the University of Pennsylvania with a master's and doctoral degrees, in 1968 and 1972.He taught at...

     for The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction
  • William Minoru Hohri for Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese American Redress

1990s

1990
  • Adrienne Kennedy
    Adrienne Kennedy
    Adrienne Kennedy is an African-American playwright and was a key figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She is best known for her first major play Funnyhouse of a Negro....

     for People Who Led to My Plays
  • Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
    Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
    Barbara Grizzuti Harrison was an American journalist, essayist and memoirist. She is best known for her autobiographical work, particularly her account of growing up as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and for her travel writing.- Early life :Barbara Grizzuti was born in Queens, New York City, on 14...

     for Italian Days
  • Elizabeth Woody
    Elizabeth Woody
    Elizabeth Woody is a Navajo-Warm Springs-Wasco-Yakama artist, author, and educator.-Background:Elizabeth Woody was born in Ganado, Arizona in 1959. She is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in Oregon. She is born for Tódích'íinii...

     for Hand into Stone: Poems
  • Hualing Nieh for Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China
  • Itabari Njeri
    Itabari Njeri
    -Life:Njeri was raised in Brooklyn and Harlem. She graduated from Boston University, and Columbia University with an M.S.In 1978, she joined The Miami Herald, and then The Los Angeles Times....

     for Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone
  • James M. Freeman
    James M. Freeman
    James M. Freeman is an American anthropologist, and professor at San Jose State University.-Life:He graduated from Northwestern University, Harvard University with an MA, and a Ph.D. in Social Relations in 1968.-Awards:* 1998-2001 Alfred P...

     for Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives
  • John C. Walter
    John C. Walter
    John Christopher Walter is an American historian, and professor at University of Washington.He graduated from University of Maine, with a Ph.D., in 1972.-Works:** Black Athletes and the Color Line: In Their Own Words, with Malina Iida...

    , J. Raymond Jones
    J. Raymond Jones
    J. "The Fox" Raymond Jones, African American New York politician. He moved to New York City in 1918. He challenged Tammany Hall leader Carmine DeSapio twice. After a failed campaign seeking support to his candidature in 1958, Jones succeeded in becoming the first black leader of Tammany in 1964...

     for The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920-1970
  • John Norton
    John Norton (author)
    -Life:John Norton graduated from Boston College and the University of Pennsylvania with an M.A. and Ph.D. He taught at the University of California, Riverside....

     for Light at the End of the Bog
  • José Emilio González
    José Emilio González
    José Emilio González was an Puerto Rican literary critic and editor.He graduated from University of Puerto Rico in 1940, Boston University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the Sorbonne....

     for Vivar a Hostos
  • Sergei Kan
    Sergei Kan
    Sergei A. Kan is an American anthropologist known for his research with and writings on the Tlingit people of southeast Alaska, focusing on the potlatch and on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Tlingit communities....

     for Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century
  • Lloyd A. Thompson
    Lloyd A. Thompson
    Lloyd Arthur Thompson was an Nigerian classicist, and scholar.-Life:He graduated from St John's College, Cambridge, with an MA.He taught at University of Ibadan Nigeria, for 40 years....

     for Romans and Blacks
  • Martin Bernal
    Martin Bernal
    Martin Gardiner Bernal is a Professor Emeritus of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is a scholar of modern Chinese political history...

     for Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization
    Black Athena
    Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization is a highly controversial three-volume work by Martin Bernal. He discusses Ancient Greece in a new light. Bernal's thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in relation to Greece's African and Asiatic neighbors, which he...

  • Michelle T. Clinton
    Michelle T. Clinton
    -CDs:*Michèlle T. Clinton and Wanda Coleman: “Black Angels”, New Alliance Records, NAR CD 031, 1988.-External links:...

    , Sesshu Foster
    Sesshu Foster
    Sesshu Foster is an American poet.He has taught composition and literature in East LA since 1985, and has also taught at the University of Iowa, the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Jack Kerouac School's Summer Writing Program.He was in residence...

     for Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry
  • Miles Davis
    Miles Davis
    Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz,...

     for Miles
  • Paula Gunn Allen
    Paula Gunn Allen
    Paula Gunn Allen was a Native American poet, literary critic, lesbian activist, and novelist.Born Paula Marie Francis in Albuquerque, Allen grew up in Cubero, New Mexico, a Spanish-Mexican land grant village bordering the Laguna Pueblo reservation...

     for Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women
  • Shirley Geok-lin Lim
    Shirley Geok-lin Lim
    Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca Malaysia. She is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Her first collection of poems, Crossing The Peninsula, published in 1980, won her the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an Asian and for a woman...

    , Mayumi Tsutakawa, Margarita Donnelly for The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology
  • Daniela Gioseffi
    Daniela Gioseffi
    Daniela Gioseffi is a poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and performer who won the American Book Award in 1990 for Women on War; International Writings from Antiquity to the Present...

     for Women on War (Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age)


1991
  • Alejandro Murguía
    Alejandro Murguía
    Alejandro Murguía is an American poet, short story writer, and editor.He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches at San Francisco State University.-External links:...

     for Southern Front
  • Bell Hooks
    Bell hooks
    Gloria Jean Watkins , better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, feminist, and social activist....

     for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
  • Bruce Wright for Black Robes, White Justice: Why Our Legal System Doesn't Work for Blacks
  • Charley Trujillo for Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam
  • D. H. Melhem
    D. H. Melhem
    D. H. Melhem is an American poet, novelist, and editor.-Life:She graduated from New York University cum laude, from City College with a master’s degree, and from City University of New York, with a doctoral degree in English and American literature.She is a lifelong resident of New York City,...

     for Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions & Interviews
  • Deborah Keenan
    Deborah Keenan
    -Life:She edits for Milkweed editions.She teaches at Hamline University.She lives with her husband, Stephen Seidel, who is director of urban programs for Habitat for Humanity...

     for Looking for Home: Women Writing About Exile
  • Jessica Hagedorn
    Jessica Hagedorn
    Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn is a Filipino-American playwright, writer, poet, storyteller, musician, and multimedia performance artist.-Biography:...

     for Dogeaters
    Dogeaters
    Dogeaters is a novel written by Jessica Hagedorn and published in 1990. Hagedorn also adapted her novel into a play by the same name. Dogeaters, set in the late 1950s in Manila , addresses several social, political and cultural issues present in the Philippines during the 1950s.The title is a...

  • John Edgar Wideman
    John Edgar Wideman
    John Edgar Wideman is an American writer, professor at Brown University, and sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.-Early life:...

     for Philadelphia Fire: A Novel
  • Joy Harjo
    Joy Harjo
    Joy Harjo is a Native American poet, musician, and author of ancestry. Known primarily as a poet, Harjo has also taught at the college level, played alto saxophone with a band called Poetic Justice, edited literary journals, and written screenplays. She is a member of the Muscogee Nation and...

     for In Mad Love and War
  • Karen Tei Yamashita
    Karen Tei Yamashita
    Karen Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American writer and Associate Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature...

     for Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
    Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
    Through the Arc of the Rain Forest is a novel by Japanese-American author Karen Tei Yamashita. The novel follows several characters over the course of several years - including a man who discovers the healing properties of feathers, a pilgrim named Chico Paco, pigeon caretakers and the three-armed...

  • Lucia Berlin
    Lucia Berlin
    Lucia Berlin was an American short story writer.-Overview:Berlin began publishing relatively late in life, under the encouragement and sometimes tutelage of poet Ed Dorn. Her first small collection, Angels Laundromat was published in 1981, but her published stories were written as early as 1960...

     for Homesick: New and Selected Stories
  • Mary Crow Dog
    Mary Crow Dog
    Mary Brave Bird, also known as Mary Brave Woman Olguin and Mary Crow Dog is a Brulé Lakota writer and activist who was a member of the American Indian Movement during the 1970s and participated in some of their most publicized events, including the Wounded Knee Incident when she was 20 years...

     for Lakota Woman
    Lakota Woman
    Lakota Woman is a memoir by Mary Brave Bird, formerly Mary Crow Dog, a Sicangu Lakota. Reared on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, she describes her childhood and young adulthood, which included many historical events associated with the American Indian Movement.Lakota Woman describes...

  • Meridel Le Sueur
    Meridel Le Sueur
    Meridel Le Sueur was an American writer associated with the proletarian movement of the 1930s and 1940s...

     for Harvest Song: Collected Essays and Stories
  • Mill Hunk Herald Collective for Overtime: Punchin' Out With the Mill Hunk Herald Magazine
  • Nora Marks Dauenhauer
    Nora Marks Dauenhauer
    Nora Marks Dauenhauer is an American poet and short-story writer and a scholar of the language and traditions of the Tlingit aboriginal nation in Alaska, of which she is a member...

    , Richard Dauenhauer
    Richard Dauenhauer
    Richard Dauenhauer is an American poet and translator who has married into, and become an expert on, the Tlingit nation of southeastern Alaska. His wife is the Tlingit poet and scholar Nora Marks Dauenhauer. He won an American Book Award for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802...

     for Haa Tuwunaagu Yis, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory
  • R. Baxter Miller
    R. Baxter Miller
    R. Baxter Miller is an American writer, and professor at University of Georgia. His book, The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes won the 1991 American Book Award.He graduated from Brown University with a PhD....

     for The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes
  • Thomas Centolella
    Thomas Centolella
    -Life:Centolella has written several books of poetry, including Terra Firma and Lights & Mysteries. His poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review,Parthenon West Review and Ploughshares,among many other magazines. His poem "View #45", was read at the United Nations as...

     for Terra Firma


1992
  • A'Lelia Perry Bundles for Madam C.J. Walker
  • Art Spiegelman
    Art Spiegelman
    Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...

     for The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
    Maus
    Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman, is a biography of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. It alternates between descriptions of Vladek's life in Poland before and during the Second World War and Vladek's later life in the Rego Park neighborhood of...

  • Benjamin Alire Saenz
    Benjamin Alire Saenz
    Benjamin Alire Sáenz is an award-winning American poet, novelist and writer of children's books.-Life:He was born at Old Picacho, New Mexico, the fourth of seven children, and was raised on a small farm near Mesilla, New Mexico....

     for Calendar of Dust
  • Donna J. Haraway for Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
  • Fritjof Capra
    Fritjof Capra
    Fritjof Capra is an Austrian-born American physicist. He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, and is on the faculty of Schumacher College....

     for Belonging to the universe: Explorations on the frontiers of science and spirituality
  • Jose Antonio Burciaga
    José Antonio Burciaga
    José Antonio "Tony" Burciaga was a Chicano artist, poet, and writer who explored issues of Chicano identity and American society.-Early life:...

     for Undocumented Love/Amor Indocumentado: A Personal Anthology of Poetry
  • Keith Gilyard
    Keith Gilyard
    Raymond Keith Gilyard is a prominent writer and American professor of English who teaches and researches in the fields of rhetoric, composition, literacy studies, sociolinguistics, and African American literature...

     for Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence
  • Lucy Thompson
    Lucy Thompson
    Lucy Thompson is an author known for her 1916 To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. She wrote the book to preserve her people's stories. The book received the American Book Award decades later. Outside the book she is known to have come from "Yurok aristocracy" and be married to...

     for To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman
  • Norma Field
    Norma Field
    Norma M. Field is an author and professor of East Asian studies at the University of Chicago. She teaches Premodern Japanese Poetry and Prose, Premodern Japanese Language, and Gender Studies as relating to Japanese women....

     for In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century's End
  • Peter Bacho
    Peter Bacho
    Peter Bacho is a writer and teacher best known for his book Cebu which won the American Book Award. The book is considered literary significant among Filipino American literature because of its explorations in themes such as neocolonialism and Filipino-American identity.Bacho also won the...

     for Cebu
    Cebu (novel)
    Cebu is a 1991 novel by Filipino American author Peter Bacho the "most visible figure" of second-generation, native-born Filipino American writing and one of several Seattle novelists in the 1990s to explore the racial history and sociology of Seattle...

  • Peter Kalifornsky
    Peter Kalifornsky
    Peter Kalifornsky , was a self-taught writer and ethnographer of Kenai, Alaska, who wrote traditional stories, poems, and language lessons in the Outer Inlet dialect of Dena'ina, a language of the Athabaskan language group...

     for Dena'ina Legacy: K'tl'egh'i Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky
  • Raymond Andrews
    Raymond Andrews
    Raymond Andrews was an African American novelist.-Early life and education:Raymond Andrews was born June 6, 1934 in Plainview, Georgia and grew up in north central Georgia. Andrews' parents, George and Viola Andrews, were sharecroppers and he was the fourth of their ten children...

     for Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire
  • Sandra Scofield
    Sandra Scofield
    Sandra Scofield is an American novelist, essayist, editor and author of writers’ guides.Sandra Scofield was born to Edith Aileen Hambleton in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1943....

     for Beyond Deserving
  • Sheila Hamanaka
    Sheila Hamanaka
    -Works:* In Search Of The Spirit: The Living National Treasures of Japan, 1999 Morrow Junior, Sheila Hamanaka, Ayano Ohmi, ISBN 9780688146078-Criticism:**-Reviews:...

     for Journey
  • Stephen R. Fox for The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans During World War II
  • Steven R. Carter
    Steven R. Carter
    -Life:He graduated from Denison University, and from Ohio State University with an MA, and Ph.D.He taught at University of North Carolina at Wilmington, University of Sassari, University of Puerto Rico. He teaches at Salem State College....

     for Hansberry's Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity,
  • Verlyn Klinkenborg
    Verlyn Klinkenborg
    Verlyn Klinkenborg is an American non-fiction author. Since 1997, he has been a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. His books include The Rural Life, Making Hay, The Last Fine Time, and Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile...

     for The Last Fine Time
  • William B. Branch
    William B. Branch
    William Blackwell Branch is an African American playwright, and editor.He graduated from Northwestern University in 1949, and from Columbia University with an M.F.A...

    , Amiri Baraka
    Amiri Baraka
    Amiri Baraka , formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism...

    , August Wilson
    August Wilson
    August Wilson was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama...

     for Black Thunder: An Anthology of African-American Drama


1993
  • Asake Bomani, Belvie Rooks for Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris
  • Christopher Mogil
    Christopher Mogil
    Christopher Mogil is an American philanthropist, and author.His book, We Gave Away a Fortune won a 1993 American Book Award.-Works:*Christopher Mogil, Anne Slepian, Peter Woodrow We gave away a fortune, New Society Publishers, 1992, ISBN 9780865712218-Eteranal...

    , Peter Woodrow for We Gave Away a Fortune
  • Cornel West
    Cornel West
    Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America....

     for Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times
  • Denise Giardina
    Denise Giardina
    Denise Giardina is a novelist. Her book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South. The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award...

     for Unquiet Earth
  • Diane Glancy
    Diane Glancy
    Diane Glancy was born in 1941 in Kansas City, Missouri. She is a Cherokee poet, author and playwright. Glancy was awarded a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Missouri in 1964, then later continued her education at the University of Central Oklahoma, earning her a Masters degree in English...

     for Claiming Breath
  • Eugene B. Redmond
    Eugene B. Redmond
    Eugene B. Redmond is an American poet, and academic. His poetry is closely connected to the Black Arts Movement and the city of East St. Louis, Illinois.-Life:...

     for The Eye in the Ceiling
  • Francisco X. Alarcón
    Francisco X. Alarcón
    Francisco Xavier Alarcón is an American poet and educator.-Life:He moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, when he was 6...

     for Snake Poems
  • Gerald Graff
    Gerald Graff
    Gerald Graff is a professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1959 and his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1963...

     for Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education
  • Jack Beatty
    Jack Beatty
    Jack J. Beatty is a writer, senior editor of The Atlantic, and news analyst for On Point, the national NPR news program.-Awards:* 1993 American Book Award* Poynter Fellow at Yale* 1990 Guggenheim Fellowship * two Alfred P...

     for The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
  • Leroy V. Quintana for The History of Home
  • Katherine Peter for Neets'aii Gwiindaii: Living in the Chandalar Country
  • Nelson George
    Nelson George
    Nelson George is an African American author, columnist, music and culture critic, journalist, and filmmaker. He has been nominated twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award....

     for Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball
  • Ninotchka Rosca
    Ninotchka Rosca
    Ninotchka Rosca is a Filipina feminist, author, journalist and human rights activist who is active in AF3IRM , the Mariposa Center for Change , Sisterhood is Global and the initiating committee of the MARIPOSA ALLIANCE , a multi-racial, multi-ethnic women's activist center for understanding the...

     for Twice Blessed: A Novel


1994
  • Giose Rimanelli for Benedetta in Guysterland
  • Eric Drooker for Flood!: A Novel in Pictures
  • Graciela Limón
    Graciela Limón
    -Life:Graciela Limón graduated from Marymount College , Fundación Universidad de las Américas, Puebla with a master's degree, and from University of California Los Angeles with a Ph.D....

     for In Search of Bernabe
  • Gregory J. Reed for Economic Empowerment Through the Church
  • Janet Campbell Hale
    Janet Campbell Hale
    Janet Campbell Hale is a Native American writer. Her father was a full-blood Coeur d'Alene, and her mother was of Kootenay, Cree and Irish descent....

     for Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter
  • Jill Nelson
    Jill Nelson
    Jill Nelson is a prominent African American journalist and novelist. She has written several books, including the autobiographical Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, which won an American Book Award, and is currently Professor of Journalism at the City College of New York.Jill...

     for Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience
  • Lawson Fusao Inada
    Lawson Fusao Inada
    Lawson Fusao Inada is an American poet and was the fifth poet laureate of the U.S. state of Oregon.-Early life:Inada is a third-generation Japanese American...

     for Legends from Camp
  • Nicole Blackman
    Nicole Blackman
    Nicole Blackman is a New York City-born performance artist, poet, author, and vocalist.-Literary career:Blackman is involved in the North American goth, spoken word and transgressive literature scenes....

     for Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
  • Paul Gilroy
    Paul Gilroy
    -Biography:Born in the East End of London to Guyanese and English parents , he was educated at University College School and obtained his bachelor's degree at Sussex University in 1978. He moved from there to Birmingham University where he completed his Ph.D...

     for The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
  • Ronald Takaki
    Ronald Takaki
    Ronald Toshiyuki Takaki was an academic, historian, ethnographer and author. Born in Oahu, Hawai'i, his work addresses stereotypes of Asian Americans, such as the model minority concept.-Early life:...

     for A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
    A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
    -Overview:It deals with the subject of minority perspectives of multicultural America, incorporating quotes, folk songs, letters, telegrams, and photographs into the text...

  • Rose L. Glickman for Daughters of Feminists
  • Tino Villanueva
    Tino Villanueva
    Tino Villanueva is an American poet and writer.-Life:In 1963, he was drafted into the United States Army, and spent two years in the Panama Canal Zone. There he became immersed in Hispanic literature, reading Rubén Darío and José Martí. He graduated from Texas State University–San Marcos, on the...

     for Scene from the Movie GIANT
  • Virginia L. Kroll for Wood-Hoopoe Willie


1995
  • Abraham Rodriguez
    Abraham Rodriguez
    Abraham Rodriguez Jr. is a Puerto Rican novelist and short story author who writes in English about the experience of Latinos in the United States. Although he has been living in Germany since the mid-90s, Rodriguez continues to set his stories in the South Bronx...

     for Spidertown: A Novel
  • Herb Boyd, Robert L. Allen
    Robert L. Allen
    Robert Lee Allen is an activist, writer, and Adjunct Professor of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Allen received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, and previously taught at San José State University and...

     for Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America—An Anthology
  • Denise Chavez
    Denise Chavez
    Denise Elia Chavez is an American author, playwright, and stage director. She was born to an Hispano family in Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States, and graduated from Madonna High School in Mesilla. She received her Bachelor's from New Mexico State University and Master's degrees in Dramatic...

     for Face of an Angel
  • John Egerton for Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South
  • John Ross
    John Ross (activist)
    John Ross was an American author, poet, freelance journalist, and activist who lived in Mexico and wrote extensively on its leftist political movements....

     for Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas
  • Thomas Avena for Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS
  • Linda Raymond for Rocking the Babies: A Novel
  • Li-Young Lee
    Li-Young Lee
    Li-Young Lee is an American poet. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His maternal grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President, who attempted to make himself emperor...

     for The Winged Seed: A Remembrance
  • Marianna De Marco Torgovnick for Crossing Ocean Parkway
  • Marnie Mueller
    Marnie Mueller
    -Life:In 1963 she joined the Peace Corps, serving two years in Guayaquil, Ecuador.She worked for WBAI as Programming Director, but resigned in 1977, over staff cuts.She lives in New York City, with her husband Fritz Mueller.-Awards:...

     for Green Fires: Assault on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest
  • Peter Quinn
    Peter Quinn
    Peter Quinn may refer to:*Peter Quinn , head of the Data Management Division at the European Southern Observatory*Peter Quinn , served as President of the Gaelic Athletic Association from 1991 until 1994...

     for Banished Children of Eve, A Novel of Civil War New York
  • Sandra Martz for I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted
  • Gordon Henry Jr. for The Light People
  • Tricia Rose
    Tricia Rose
    Tricia Rose is a professor and chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, cultural critic and public intellectual.-Early life:...

     for Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America


1996
  • Agate Nesaule for A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile
  • Arthur Sze
    Arthur Sze
    Arthur Sze is a second-generation Chinese American poet.-Background:Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry...

     for Archipelago
  • Chang-Rae Lee
    Chang-Rae Lee
    Chang-rae Lee is a Korean American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where he has served as the director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.-Early life:...

     for Native Speaker
    Native Speaker
    Native Speaker is Chang-Rae Lee’s first novel. In Native Speaker, he creates a man named Henry Park who tries to assimilate into American society and become a “native speaker.”-Plot summary:...

  • Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
    Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
    Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program....

     for Arranged Marriage
  • E.J. Miller Laino
    E.J. Miller Laino
    E.J. Miller Laino is an American poet, author of Girl Hurt . She has a new collection, Cracking Open, forthcoming. Her honors include a Vermont Studio Center fellowship and the 1996 American Book Award, and her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including The American Poetry...

     for Girl Hurt
  • Glenn C. Loury for One by One from the Inside Out: Race and Responsibility in America
  • James W. Loewen for Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
  • Joe Sacco
    Joe Sacco
    Joe Sacco is a Maltese-American comics artist and journalist. He achieved international fame through the 1996 American Book Award-winning Palestine, and his graphic novel on the Bosnian War, Safe Area Goražde.- Biography :...

    , Edward Said
    Edward Said
    Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...

     for Palestine
  • Kimiko Hahn
    Kimiko Hahn
    Kimiko Hahn is an American poet and instructor of poetry.-Personal:Hahn received a bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa and an M.A...

     for The Unbearable Heart
  • Maria Espinosa
    Maria Espinosa
    -Life:She studied at Harvard University and Columbia University, and graduated from San Francisco State University with an MA in Creative Writing.She taught at New College of California, and at City College of San Francisco....

     for Longing
  • Robert Viscusi for Astoria
  • Sherman Alexie
    Sherman Alexie
    Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. is a writer, poet, filmmaker, and occasional comedian. Much of his writing draws on his experiences as a Native American. Two of Alexie's best known works are The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven , a book of short stories and Smoke Signals, a film...

     for Reservation Blues
    Reservation Blues
    Reservation Blues is a 1995 novel by Sherman Alexie. The novel follows the story of the rise and fall of a rock and blues band of Spokane Indians from the Spokane Reservation in Washington...

  • Ron Sakolsky
    Ron Sakolsky
    Ron Sakolsky is a scholar covering the intersection of music, revolution and radio. As of 2005, Sakolsky is Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Springfield, previously known as Sangamon State University. For more than twenty years he taught at the university on...

    , Fred Weihan Ho for Sounding Off!: Music as Resistance / Rebellion / Revolution
  • Stephanie Cowell for The Physician of London: The Second Part of the Seventeenth-Century Trilogy of Nicholas Cooke
  • William H. Gass
    William H. Gass
    William Howard Gass is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor. He has written two novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which have won National Book Critics Circle Award...

     for The Tunnel


1997
  • Alurista
    Alurista
    Alurista is the nom de plume of Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia , a Chicano poet and activist.-Youth and education:...

     for Et Tu ... Raza
  • Derrick Bell
    Derrick Bell
    Derrick Albert Bell, Jr. was the first tenured African-American professor of Law at Harvard University, and largely credited as the originator of Critical Race Theory. He was the former dean of the University of Oregon School of Law.- Education and early career :Born in the Hill District of...

     for Gospel Choirs: Psalms Of Survival In An Alien Land Called Home
  • Dorothy Barresi
    Dorothy Barresi
    -Life:She was raised in Akron, Ohio. She teaches in the English Department at California State University at Northridge, where she is Chair of the Creative Writing Program....

     for The Post-Rapture Diner
  • Guillermo Gomez-Pena
    Guillermo Gómez-Peña
    Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City and moved to the US in 1978, where he established himself as a performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. He has pioneered multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, performance photography and installation art...

     for The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century
  • Louis Owens
    Louis Owens
    Louis Owens was a novelist and scholar of Choctaw, Cherokee and Irish descent. He is known for a series of Native-themed mystery novels and for his contributions to the then-fledgling field of Native American Studies...

     for Nightland
  • Martin Espada
    Martín Espada
    Martín Espada is a Latino poet, and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.- Life and career :Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York...

     for Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems
  • Montserrat Fontes for Dreams of the Centaur: A Novel
  • Noel Ignatiev
    Noel Ignatiev
    Noel Ignatiev is an American history professor at the Massachusetts College of Art best known for his call to "abolish" the white race, which he defines as "white privilege and race identity." Ignatiev is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society...

     for Race Traitor
  • Shirley Geok-lin Lim
    Shirley Geok-lin Lim
    Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca Malaysia. She is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Her first collection of poems, Crossing The Peninsula, published in 1980, won her the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an Asian and for a woman...

     for Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands
  • Sunaina Maira for Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America
  • Thulani Davis for Maker of Saints
  • Tom De Haven
    Tom De Haven
    Tom De Haven is an American author, editor, journalist, and writing teacher.His recurring subjects include literary and film noir, the Hollywood studio system and the American comics industry...

     for Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies: A Novel
  • William M. Banks for Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life
  • Brenda Knight for Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution


1998
  • Allison Adelle Hedge Coke for Dog Road Woman
  • Angela Y. Davis for Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
  • Brenda Marie Osbey
    Brenda Marie Osbey
    -Life:She graduated from Dillard University, Paul Valéry University, Montpellier III, and from the University of Kentucky, with an M.A.She has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles, Loyola University New Orleans, and at Dillard University. She was Visiting Writer-in-residence at...

     for All Saints: New and Selected Poems
  • Don DeLillo
    Don DeLillo
    Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...

     for Underworld
    Underworld (DeLillo novel)
    Underworld is a postmodern novel published in 1997 by Don DeLillo. It was nominated for the National Book Award, was a best-seller, and is one of DeLillo's better-known novels....

  • Jim Barnes
    Jim Barnes (writer)
    Jim Weaver McKown Barnes is a Native American author born near Summerfield, Oklahoma and is of Choctaw and Welsh heritage. He received his BA from Southeastern State College in Durant, OK in 1964 and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas...

     for On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions
  • John A. Williams for Safari West: Poems
  • Nancy Rawles
    Nancy Rawles
    Nancy Rawles is an African American playwright, novelist, and teacher.-Life:Nancy grew up in Los Angeles. She graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in Journalism....

     for Love Like Gumbo
  • Nora Okja Keller
    Nora Okja Keller
    Nora Okja Keller is a Korean American author. Her 1997 breakthrough work of fiction, Comfort Woman, and the 2002 sequel, Fox Girl, focus on multigenerational trauma resulting from Korean women's experiences as sex slaves, euphemistically called comfort women, for Japanese troops during World War...

     for Comfort Woman
  • Sandra Benitez
    Sandra Benitez
    -Life:Her twin sister, Susana, died just 37 days after their birth.A year later, her father, who worked for the U.S. State Department, was assigned to Mexico, where her sister, Anita, was born....

     for Bitter Grounds: A Novel
  • Scott DeVeaux for The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History
  • Thomas Lynch
    Thomas Lynch (poet)
    Thomas Lynch is an American poet, essayist, and undertaker.-Early life:Lynch was educated by nuns and Christian Brothers at Brother Rice High School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Lynch then went to university and mortuary school, from which he graduated in 1973...

     for The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade


1999
  • Alice McDermott
    Alice McDermott
    Alice McDermott is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St...

     for Charming Billy
  • Anna Linzer
    Anna Linzer
    Anna O. Linzer is an American novelist, and non-profit management consultant.-Life:Anna Linzer lived on the Suquamish Indian Reservation in Indianola, Washington....

     for Ghost Dancing
  • Brian Ward for Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations
  • Chiori Santiago for Home to Medicine Mountain
  • E. Donald Two-Rivers
    E. Donald Two-Rivers
    E. Donald "Ed" Two-Rivers was Anishinaabe...

     for Survivor's Medicine: Short Stories
  • Edwidge Danticat for The Farming of Bones
  • Judith Roche
    Judith Roche
    Judith Roche is a poet and the author of three collections of poetry. They are Myrrh/My Life as a Screamer, Ghost and recently, Wisdom of the Body, which won a 2007 American Book Award. She is also co-editor of First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim, which also won an...

    , Meg McHutchison for First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim
  • Gioia Timpanelli for Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily
  • Gloria Naylor
    Gloria Naylor
    Gloria Naylor is an African American novelist and educator.-Early life:Born in New York, she was the first child to Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin. As Naylor grew up, her father was a transit worker and her mother was a telephone operator. When Naylor was young, her mother encouraged her to...

     for The Men of Brewster Place: A Novel
  • James D. Houston
    James D. Houston
    James Dudley Houston was an American novelist. He wrote nine novels in total.Houston was born in San Francisco, where his parents had migrated from Quanah, Texas, a small town near Oklahoma...

     for The Last Paradise
  • Jerry Lipka, Gerald V. Mohatt, Ciulistet Group for Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yup¡k Eskimo Examples
  • Trey Ellis
    Trey Ellis
    Trey Ellis is an American novelist, screenwriter, professor, and essayist.He was born in Washington D.C. and attended Stanford University.-Novels and memoirs:...

     for Right Here, Right Now
  • Josip Novakovich
    Josip Novakovich
    Josip Novakovich is a Croatian American writer.His grandparents had immigrated from the Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Cleveland, Ohio, and, after the First World War, his grandfather returned to what had become Yugoslavia...

     for Salvation and Other Disasters
  • Lauro Flores for The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature
  • Luís Alberto Urrea
    Luís Alberto Urrea
    Luís Alberto Urrea is a Mexican American poet, novelist, and essayist.-Life:Urrea is the son of a Mexican father and an American mother...

     for Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life
  • Nelson George
    Nelson George
    Nelson George is an African American author, columnist, music and culture critic, journalist, and filmmaker. He has been nominated twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award....

     for Hip Hop America: Hip Hop and the Molding of Black Generation X
  • Speer Morgan
    Speer Morgan
    Speer Morgan is an American novelist, short story writer, and editor.-Life:The author of five novels and one short story collection, Speer Morgan is a professor and editor for The Missouri Review...

     for The Freshour Cylinders
  • Gary Gach
    Gary Gach
    Gary Gregory Gach is an American author, translator, editor, teacher and poet living on Russian Hill, San Francisco. He has published six books. His work has been translated into several languages...

     for What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop

2000s

2000
  • Allan J. Ryan for The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art
  • Andrés Montoya
    Andrés Montoya
    -Life:He graduated from California State University, Fresno, where he studied with Philip Levine, and from the University of Oregon, with a Master of Fine Arts, where he studied with Garrett Hongo....

     for The Ice Worker Sings and Other Poems
  • Camille Peri, Kate Moses for Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood
  • David A. J. Richards for Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity
  • David Toop
    David Toop
    David Toop is an English musician and author, and as of 2001 was visiting Research Fellow in the Media School at London College of Communication. He was notably a member of The Flying Lizards. He was a prominent contributor to the British magazine The Face. He is a regular contributor to The Wire,...

     for Exotica
  • Elva Trevino Hart for Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child
  • Emil Guillermo
    Emil Guillermo
    Emil Guillermo is a print and broadcast journalist, commentator and humorist. He writes a column, "Emil Amok," for AsianWeek- the most widely read and largest circulating Asian American newsweekly in the U.S....

     for Amok: Essays from an Asian American Perspective; With an Introduction by Ishmael Reed
  • Frank Chin
    Frank Chin
    Frank Chin is an American author and playwright.- Life and career :Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California, but was raised to the age of six by a retired Vaudeville couple in Placerville, California. At six his mother brought him back to the San Francisco Bay Area to live in Oakland Chinatown...

     for The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.
  • Helen Thomas
    Helen Thomas
    Helen Thomas is an American author and former news service reporter, member of the White House Press Corps and opinion columnist. She worked for the United Press and post-1958 successor United Press International for 57 years, first as a correspondent, and later as White House bureau manager...

     for Front Row at the White House : My Life and Times
  • Janisse Ray
    Janisse Ray
    Janisse Ray is an American writer, naturalist, and environmental activist.She attended North Georgia College, 1980–82; Florida State University, B.A., 1984; and the University of Montana, M.F.A., 1997....

     for Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
  • John Russell Rickford, Russell John Rickford for Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English
  • Leroy TeCube for Year in Nam: A Native American Soldier's Story
  • Lois-Ann Yamanaka
    Lois-Ann Yamanaka
    Lois-Ann Yamanaka is a Japanese-American poet and novelist from Hawaii. Many of her critically acclaimed literary works are written in Hawaiian Pidgin, and some of her writing has dealt with controversial ethnic issues...

     for Heads By Harry
  • Michael Lally
    Michael Lally
    Michael Lally , author and historian.A native of Fairhill in the Claddagh, Lally has been a seminarian, shopkeeper, publican, and a voluntary worker with the Brothers of Charity...

     for It's Not Nostalgia: Poetry & Prose
  • Michael Patrick MacDonald
    Michael Patrick MacDonald
    Michael Patrick MacDonald is an Irish-American activist against crime and violence and author of his memoir, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie. Since being involved in activism, he helped to start Boston's gun-buyback program, founded the South Boston Vigil Group, which works with survivor...

     for All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
  • Rahna Reiko Rizzuto for Why She Left Us: A Novel
  • Robert Creeley
    Robert Creeley
    Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...

     for The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005


2001
  • Amanda J. Cobb for Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949
  • Andrea Dworkin
    Andrea Dworkin
    Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women....

     for Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation
  • Carolyne Wright
    Carolyne Wright
    -Life:She studied at Seattle University, New York University, and graduated from Syracuse University with master's and doctoral degrees.She has held visiting creative writing posts at Radcliffe College, Sweet Briar College, Emory University, University of Wyoming, University of Miami, Oklahoma...

     for Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire
  • Chalmers Johnson
    Chalmers Johnson
    Chalmers Ashby Johnson was an American author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Korean War, was a consultant for the CIA from 1967–1973, and chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1972...

     for Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
  • Cheri Register
    Cheri Register
    Cheri Register is an American author and teacher. She has written seven books and co-authored three, the most famous of which, Packinghouse Daughter, is a memoir based on her working-class upbringing in her home town of Albert Lea, in Minnesota. She also writes about her experiences as mother of...

     for Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir
  • Chris Ware
    Chris Ware
    Franklin Christenson Ware , is an American comic book artist and cartoonist, widely known for his Acme Novelty Library series and the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he resides in the Chicago area, Illinois...

     for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
  • Diana Garcia
    Diana Garcia
    -Life:She was raised in Merced, California and is the oldest of three children. Her parents were migrant field workers who lived in a farm labor camp, California Packing Company Camp #15, when she was born...

     for When Living Was a Labor Camp
  • Elizabeth Nunez
    Elizabeth Nunez
    Elizabeth Nunez is a United States novelist, and distinguished professor of English at Medgar Evers College–CUNY, in Brooklyn, New York. Nunez is also cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference. She emigrated to the United States from Trinidad, and received her Ph.D...

     for Bruised Hibiscus
  • Janet McAdams
    Janet McAdams
    Janet McAdams is an Alabama Creek/Scottish/Irish poet and the author of The Island of Lost Luggage which received an American Book Award in 2001 and the First Book Award for Poetry from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas in 1999...

     for Island of Lost Luggage
  • Philip Whalen
    Philip Whalen
    Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.-Biography:...

     for Overtime: Selected Poems
  • Russell Leong
    Russell Leong
    Russell Charles Leong is an academic editor, a professor, a writer, and Chen Taichiquan instructor. He is currently an adjunct professor English and Asian-American studies at the University of California at Los Angeles...

     for Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories
  • Sandra M. Gilbert for Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999
  • Ted Joans
    Ted Joans
    Theodore "Ted" Joans was an American trumpeter, jazz poet and painter.Joans was born in Cairo, Illinois, but not on a riverboat as had been claimed. He earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University. He later associated with writers of the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village and San Francisco...

     for Teducation
  • Tillie Olsen
    Tillie Olsen
    Tillie Lerner Olsen was an American writer associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists.-Biography:...

     for Silences
  • William S. Penn
    William S. Penn
    William S. Penn is a mixed-race Nez Perce author and English professor at Michigan State. His work explores the issues his father faced coming to terms with his Indian heritage. His work may be classified as magical realism. He has also written a nonfiction work, All My Sins are Relatives about...

     for Killing Time With Strangers


2002
  • Aaron Abeyta
    Aaron Abeyta
    Aaron Abeyta , better known as El Hefe or simply Hefe, from el Jefe is the lead guitarist and trumpet player for the California punk band NOFX....

     for Colcha
  • Al Young
    Al Young
    Al Young is an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor. On May 15, 2005 he was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In appointing Young as Poet Laureate, the Governor praised him: "He is an educator and a man with a passion for the Arts...

     for The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990-2000
  • Alex Kuo for Lipstick and Other Stories
  • Dana Gioia
    Dana Gioia
    -Poetry:It was as a poet that Gioia first began to attract widespread attention in the early 1980s, with frequent appearances in The Hudson Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker. In the same period, he published a number of essays and book reviews...

     for Interrogations at Noon
  • Donald Phelps for Reading the Funnies : Looking at Great Cartoonists Throughout the First Half of the 20th Century
  • Gloria Frym
    Gloria Frym
    -Biography:Gloria Frym is an American poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She grew up in Los Angeles and lived in New Mexico for many years...

     for Homeless at Home
  • Jack Hirschman
    Jack Hirschman
    Jack Hirschman is an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry and essays.-Biography:...

     for Front Lines
  • Jessel Miller
    Jessel Miller
    Jessel Miller is an American watercolor artist and children's writer.-Life:Her father was a country doctor/artist, and mother was a festive singer, poet and entertainer....

     for Angels in the Vineyards
  • LeAnne Howe
    LeAnne Howe
    LeAnne Howe is an author and scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Howe's work has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. Her book Shell Shaker received the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book...

     for Shell Shaker
    Shell Shaker
    Shell Shaker is a novel by writer and playwright LeAnne Howe, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. The novel is notable for the way it interweaves two tales of murder involving flawed Choctaw political leaders set over 200 years apart in the mid 18th century and 1991, connected...

  • Lerone Bennett for Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream
  • Michael N. Nagler
    Michael N. Nagler
    Michael N. Nagler is an American academic and peace activist.-Life:He graduated from New York University, and University of California, Berkeley with an M.A. and Ph.D...

     for Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future
  • Rilla Askew
    Rilla Askew
    Rilla Askew is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, and grew up in the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. She graduated from the University of Tulsa with a B.F.A. in Theatre Performance in 1980 and went on to study creative...

     for Fire in Beulah
  • Susanne Antonetta
    Susanne Antonetta
    Susanne Antonetta , is an American poet and author. Susanne Antonetta is the pen name for Suzanne Paola, whose best-selling work is Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir . In 2001, Body Toxic received recognition as a 'Notable Book' from the New York Times, and for making Amazon.com's list of top...

     for Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
  • Tananarive Due
    Tananarive Due
    Tananarive Due is an American author.-Biography:Tananarive Priscilla Due was born in Tallahassee, Florida, the oldest of three daughters of civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due and civil rights lawyer John D. Due Jr...

     for The Living Blood


2003
  • Alejandro Murguía
    Alejandro Murguía
    Alejandro Murguía is an American poet, short story writer, and editor.He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches at San Francisco State University.-External links:...

     for This War Called Love
  • Daniel Ellsberg
    Daniel Ellsberg
    Daniel Ellsberg, PhD, is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War,...

     for Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
  • Debra Magpie Earling
    Debra Magpie Earling
    Debra Cecille Magpie Earling is an Native American novelist, and short story writer.-Life:She is of the Bitterroot Salish ....

     for Perma Red
  • Eric Porter
    Eric Porter
    Eric Richard Porter was an English actor of stage, film and television.-Early life:Porter was born in Shepherd's Bush, London, to Richard John Porter and Phoebe Elizabeth Spall...

     for What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists
  • Igor Krupnik for Akuzilleput Igaqullghet Our Words Put to Paper Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History
  • Jack Newfield
    Jack Newfield
    Jack Newfield was a muckraking journalist, employed by The Village Voice, the Daily News and the New York Post. He covered the emergence of the New Left and the civil rights movement, and was a close friend of Robert F...

     for The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania
  • Jewell Parker Rhodes
    Jewell Parker Rhodes
    Jewell Parker Rhodes is an American novelist.Rhodes is professor of Creative Writing and American Literature and former Director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Rhodes is the Artistic Director for Global Engagement and the Piper Endowed Chair of...

     for Douglass' Women : A Novel
  • Joseph Papaleo
    Joseph Papaleo
    -Life:He grew up in The Bronx. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, from Columbia University with an M.A., and from the University of Florence with a Ph.D.He taught at Sarah Lawrence College.He lived in Bronxville, New York, and Oldsmar, Florida....

     for Italian Stories
  • Kevin Baker
    Kevin Baker
    Kevin Baker is an American novelist and journalist. He was born in Englewood, New Jersey and grew up in New Jersey and Rockport, Massachusetts....

     for Paradise Alley
  • Rachel Simon
    Rachel Simon
    Rachel Simon is an American author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her six books include the 2011 novel , which was her first New York Times Bestseller, and the 2002 memoir , which was a national bestseller...

     for Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey
  • Rick Heide for Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California
  • Velma Wallis
    Velma Wallis
    Velma Wallis is an Athabascan Indian and bestselling U.S. novelist. Her work has been translated into 17 languages.-Life and work:...

     for Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River


2004
  • A. Robert Lee
    A. Robert Lee
    -Life:His boyhood was spent in Manchester before moving on to a BA in English from University College London in 1963. He received a research MA from King's College London in 1965, with a thesis on Herman Melville, and holds a Ph.D from the University of Kent, UK. From 1967 until 1996 he taught at...

     for Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions
  • Charisse Jones
    Charisse Jones
    Charisse Jones is an African American journalist, and essayist.-Life:She was a staff writer for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and commentator for National Public Radio....

    , Kumea Shorter-Gooden for Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America
  • David Cole
    David D. Cole
    David D. Cole is an American law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He has published in various legal fields including civil rights, criminal justice, constitutional law and law and literature...

     for Enemy Aliens: Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism
  • Diana Abu-Jaber
    Diana Abu-Jaber
    Diana Abu-Jaber is Jordanian American author and a professor at Portland State University. She was born in Syracuse, New York. Her father was Jordanian and her mother was American, descended from Irish and German roots. At the age of seven she moved with her family for two years to Jordan...

     for Crescent: A Novel
  • Diane Sher Lutovich
    Diane Sher Lutovich
    Diane Sher Lutovich was an American poet, and writing teacher. She was a founding member of Sixteen Rivers Press, a publishing collective based in Northern California.She was a native of Hibbing, Minnesota.-Works:*-References:...

     for What I Stole
  • Kristin Hunter Lattany for Breaking Away
  • Michael Walsh
    Michael Walsh (author)
    Michael A. Walsh is a music critic, author, screenwriter, and media critic. After graduating from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York in 1971, he became a reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in February 1972, where he shared the New York State Publishers Association...

     for And All the Saints
  • Renato Rosaldo
    Renato Rosaldo
    -Life:He graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in 1971.He is emeritus professor at Stanford University.He teaches at New York University, and is a New York Institute for the Humanities Fellow....

     for Prayer to Spider Woman / Rezo a la Mujer Araa
  • Ruth L. Ozeki
    Ruth Ozeki
    Ruth Ozeki is a Canadian-American novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She worked in commercial television and media production for over a decade and made several independent films before turning to writing fiction.-Life:...

     for All Over Creation
  • Scott Saul for Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties


2005
  • Alisha S. Drabek for The Red Cedar of Afognak, A Driftwood Journey
  • Bernard W. Bell for The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots And Modern Literary Branches
  • Don Lee
    Don Lee (author)
    Don Lee is an American novelist who spent his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul as the son of a State Department officer. He received his B.A. in English Literature from University of California, Los Angeles and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He has also served as the primary...

     for Country of Origin: A Novel
  • Don West
    Don West (educator)
    Don West was an American writer, poet, educator, trade union organizer, civil-rights activist and a co-founder of the Highlander Folk School.-Early life and career:...

    , Jeff Biggers
    Jeff Biggers
    Jeff Biggers is an American writer, editor, journalist, playwright, critic, master storyteller and performance artist. He is the author of three books, and co-editor of a fourth....

    , George Brosi for No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems
  • Hiroshi Kashiwagi
    Hiroshi Kashiwagi
    Hiroshi Kashiwagi is a Nisei poet, playwright and actor. For his writing and performance work on stage he is considered an early pioneer of Asian American theatre.-Biography:...

     for Swimming in the American: A Memoir And Selected Writings
  • Jeff Chang
    Jeff Chang (journalist)
    Jeff Chang is an American journalist and music critic on hip hop music and culture. His 2005 book, Can't Stop Won't Stop, which chronicles the early hip hop scene, won an American Book Award in 2005...

    , D.J. Kool Herc for Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
  • Julie Chibbaro
    Julie Chibbaro
    Julie Chibbaro is the author of Deadly , a medical mystery about the hunt for Typhoid Mary. Deadly, Chibbaro’s second novel, has received excellent reviews from such journals as The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal, Booklist, Historical Novels Review, The New York Journal of...

     for Redemption
  • Lamont B. Steptoe
    Lamont B. Steptoe
    Lamont B. Steptoe is an American poet, photographer, and publisher.-Life:He was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Temple University...

     for A Long Movie of Shadows
  • Ralph M. Flores for The Horse in the Kitchen: Stories of a Mexican-American Family
  • Richard A. Clarke
    Richard A. Clarke
    Richard Alan Clarke was a U.S. government employee for 30 years, 1973–2003. He worked for the State Department during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush appointed him to chair the Counter-terrorism Security Group and to a seat on the United States National...

     for Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
  • Cecelie Berry
    Cecelie Berry
    -Life:She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Salon, Child, and O, The Oprah Magazine.-External links:*...

     for Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood


2006
  • Carlton T. Spiller
    Carlton T. Spiller
    -Life:He graduated from Rutgers University, and from Seton Hall University with a J.D., in 1982.He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.-External links:...

     for Scalding Heart
  • Darryl Dickson-Carr
    Darryl Dickson-Carr
    Darryl Dickson-Carr is an American editor and critic.-Life:He graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara, with a Ph.D.He taught at Florida State University, and teaches at Southern Methodist University.-Awards:...

     for The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction
  • David P. Diaz for The White Tortilla: Reflections of a Second -Generation Mexican - American
  • Doris Seale
    Doris Seale
    Doris Seale is a Santee Dakota and Cree poet, writer, and educator.She has written about Native Americans sending positive messages to children. Her work has helped to educate teachers about the truth about Native American people and cultures....

     for A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children
  • Jay Wright
    Jay Wright (poet)
    Jay Wright is an African-American poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he currently lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim...

     for Transfigurations: Collected Poems
  • Josh Kun
    Josh Kun
    Josh Kun is an American author, academic and music critic. Kun is an Associate Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California.He also holds a joint appointment at USC's Department of American Studies and Ethnicity...

     for Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
  • Kevin J. Mullen
    Kevin J. Mullen
    Kevin J. Mullen was an American crime writer.-Life:Mulen served in the 82nd Airborne Division....

     for The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco
  • Mackenzie Bezos
    Mackenzie Bezos
    -Life:She was raised in the Bay Area.She graduated from Princeton University, where she studied with Toni Morrison.She married Jeff Bezos in 1993, and moved to the Seattle, Washington in 1994.They have three children.-External links:*...

     for The Testing of Luther Albright: A Novel
  • Matt Briggs
    Matt Briggs
    Matt Briggs is an American novelist, and short story writer.-Biography:Matt Briggs was born in Seattle, Washington, which he still calls home. He grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley raised by working-class, counter-culture parents who cultivated and sold cannabis . Briggs has written two books set in...

     for Shoot the Buffalo
  • Matthew Shenoda
    Matthew Shenoda
    -Life:Matthew Shenoda's poems and writings have appeared in a variety of newspapers, journals, radio programs and anthologies.He has taught extensively in the fields of Ethnic Studies and Creative Writing and is currently Assistant Provost for Equity & Diversity and Professor in the School of...

     for Somewhere Else
  • P. Lewis for Nate
  • Peter Metcalfe for Gumboot Determination: The Story of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium
  • Thomas Ferraro
    Thomas Ferraro
    -Life:He graduated from Amherst College, andYale University, with a Ph.D.He teaches at Duke University.-External links:*...

     for Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
  • Tim Z. Hernandez
    Tim Z. Hernandez
    Tim Z. Hernandez is an American writer, poet, and performer.-Life:Born in Dinuba, California, he was raised in the San Joaquin Valley of Central California, having lived in the predominantly farm-worker communities, including Cutler, Reedley, Dinuba, Visalia, and Fresno. His family roots are in...

     for Skin Tax


2007
  • Daniel Cassidy
    Daniel Cassidy
    Daniel Cassidy was an American writer, filmmaker and academic.-Life:He was the son of a Navy chief petty officer...

     for How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads
  • Ernestine Hayes
    Ernestine Hayes
    Ernestine Hayes is an Native American memoirist.-Life:Ernestine Hayes was raised in Juneau, and from the age of fifteen lived in California....

     for Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir
  • Gary Panter
    Gary Panter
    Gary Panter is an illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician. Panter's work is representative of the post-underground, new wave comics movement that began with the end of Arcade: The Comics Revue and the initiation of RAW, one of the second generation in American underground comix...

     for Jimbo's Inferno
  • Jeffrey F. L. Partridge
    Jeffrey F. L. Partridge
    Jeffrey F. L. Partridge is an American writer and essayist, winner of the 2007 American Book Award for Beyond Literary Chinatown-Works:*-External links:...

     for Beyond Literary Chinatown
  • Judith Roche
    Judith Roche
    Judith Roche is a poet and the author of three collections of poetry. They are Myrrh/My Life as a Screamer, Ghost and recently, Wisdom of the Body, which won a 2007 American Book Award. She is also co-editor of First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim, which also won an...

     for Wisdom of the Body
  • Kali Vanbaale
    Kali Vanbaale
    Kali Jo Van Baale is an American novelist. Her first novel, The Space Between, was awarded an American Book Award in 2007.-Life:She grew up in Bloomfield, Iowa....

     for The Space Between
  • Michael Eric Dyson for Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
  • Patricia Klindienst
    Patricia Klindienst
    Patricia Klindienst is an American writer, and independent scholar.She graduated from Stanford University, with a Ph. D.She taught at Yale University.-Awards:* 2007 American Book Award...

     for The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America
  • Reyna Grande
    Reyna Grande
    Reyna Grande is a Mexican-immigrant author best known for her novel Across a Hundred Mountains, which, though a work of fiction, draws heavily on Grande's experiences growing up in Mexico and her Illegal immigration to the United States.- Biography :Reyna Grande was born in the city of Iguala in...

     for Across a Hundred Mountains: A Novel
  • Rigoberto Gonzalez
    Rigoberto González
    Rigoberto González is an American writer and book critic. He is an editor and author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and bilingual children's books, and self-identifies in his writing as a gay Chicano...

     for Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa


2008
  • Moustafa Bayoumi
    Moustafa Bayoumi
    Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning writer, and associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he currently lives in Brooklyn....

     for How Does It Feel to Be a Problem Being Young and Arab in America
  • Douglas A. Blackmon
    Douglas A. Blackmon
    Douglas A. Blackmon is an American writer and a Pulitzer Prize winner. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II....

      for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
  • Nora Marks Dauenhauer
    Nora Marks Dauenhauer
    Nora Marks Dauenhauer is an American poet and short-story writer and a scholar of the language and traditions of the Tlingit aboriginal nation in Alaska, of which she is a member...

    , Richard Dauenhauer
    Richard Dauenhauer
    Richard Dauenhauer is an American poet and translator who has married into, and become an expert on, the Tlingit nation of southeastern Alaska. His wife is the Tlingit poet and scholar Nora Marks Dauenhauer. He won an American Book Award for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802...

    , Lydia T. Black
    Lydia T. Black
    Lydia T. Black was an American anthropologist.She won an American Book Award for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804.-Life:...

    , and Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804
  • Maria Mazziotti Gillan
    Maria Mazziotti Gillan
    -Life:She grew up in an Italian enclave in Paterson, New Jersey's Riverside neighborhood.She graduated from Seton Hall University and from New York University with an MA In Literature. She attended Drew University...

     for All That Lies Between Us
  • Nikki Giovanni
    Nikki Giovanni
    Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Her primary focus is on the individual and the power one has to make a difference in oneself and in the lives of others. Giovanni’s poetry expresses strong racial pride, respect for family, and her...

     for The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998
  • C. S. Giscombe
    C. S. Giscombe
    Cecil S. Giscombe is an African American poet and professor of English at University of California, Berkeley.-Life:A graduate of SUNY at Albany and Cornell University, he was editor of Epoch magazine...

     for Prairie Style
  • Angela Jackson
    Angela Jackson
    Angela Jackson is a poet, playwright and writer.-Life:Her father, George Jackson, Sr. and mother, Angeline Robinson Jackson moved to Chicago...

     for Where I Must Go: A Novel
  • L. Luis Lopez
    L. Luis Lopez
    -Life:He graduated from Spring Hill College, from St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico with an M.A., and from the University of New Mexico with a Ph.D.He taught high school in Tampa, Florida, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and in Grand Junction, Colorado....

     for Each Month I Sing
  • Tom Lutz
    Tom Lutz
    -Life:He taught at the California Institute of the Arts, and the University of Iowa.He was nonfiction editor of the Los Angeles Review. His work appeared in Zyzzyva.He teaches at University of California, Riverside.He lives in Los Angeles and Iowa City....

     for Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
  • Fae Myenne Ng
    Fae Myenne Ng
    Fae Myenne Ng is an American novelist, and short story writer.-Life:She is the daughter of seamstress and a laborer, who immigrated from Guangzhou, China. She attended the University of California-Berkeley, and received her M.F.A. at Columbia University...

     for Steer Toward Rock
  • Yuko Taniguchi
    Yuko Taniguchi
    Yuko Taniguchi was is an American poet, and novelist.-Life:She came to the United States, at fifteen, and attended high school in Maryland....

     for The Ocean in the Closet
  • Lorenzo Thomas
    Lorenzo Thomas (poet)
    Lorenzo Thomas was an American poet and critic. He was born in the Republic of Panama and grew up in New York City, where his family immigrated in 1948.-Life:Thomas was a graduate of Queens College in New York...

    , Aldon Lynn Nielsen
    Aldon Lynn Nielsen
    Aldon Lynn Nielsen is an American poet, and literary critic.-Life:He was raised in the District of Columbia, where he graduated from the Federal City College and from the George Washington University, with a Ph.D....

    , editor for Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition
  • Frank B. Wilderson III
    Frank B. Wilderson III
    -Life:He graduated from Dartmouth College, Columbia University with an MFA, and University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Film Studies.He teaches African American studies and drama at the University of California, Irvine....

     for Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid
  • Jonathan Curiel
    Jonathan Curiel
    -Biography:In 1993-1994, he lived in Lahore, Pakistan, where he taught at the University of the Punjab as a Fulbright Scholar.His work appeared in San Francisco Chronicle, Columbia Journalism Review, and Tablet Magazine,...

     for Al’ America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots
  • J.J. Phillips
    J.J. Phillips
    J. J. Phillips is an African American poet.Her papers are held at Emory University.-Works: -Letters:*-Reviews:The mysterious J.J. Phillips is one of my literary heroes, and one of Exquisite Corpse’s consecrated writers...

    , Author of Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale (Lifetime Achievement Award)


2009
  • Houston A. Baker, Jr.
    Houston A. Baker, Jr.
    Houston Alfred Baker Jr. is an American scholar specializing in African American literature and currently serving as a Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University in the English department....

    , Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era
  • Danit Brown
    Danit Brown
    -Life:She graduated from Oberlin College, and Indiana University with an MFA.She teaches at Albion College.Her work has appeared Story, Glimmer Train, StoryQuarterly, and One Story.She lives in Michigan with her family.-External links:**...

    , Ask for a Convertible
  • Jericho Brown
    Jericho Brown
    Jericho Brown is an American poet who was recently awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.-Life:He graduated from Dillard University, and from the University of New Orleans with an MFA, and from the University of Houston with a Ph.D. He teaches at the University of...

    , Please
  • José Antonio Burciaga
    José Antonio Burciaga
    José Antonio "Tony" Burciaga was a Chicano artist, poet, and writer who explored issues of Chicano identity and American society.-Early life:...

    , The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga, edited by Mimi R. Gladstein and Daniel Chacón
  • Claire Hope Cummings
    Claire Hope Cummings
    -Life:She has been an Environmental lawyer for 20 years. She has farmed in California and in Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta.For four years she was an attorney for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Office of General Counsel....

    , Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds
  • Stella Pope Duarte
    Stella Pope Duarte
    -Life:She graduated from Arizona State University with a B.A. and MA in Educational Counseling.She taught at Arizona State University from 1999–2008, and South Mountain Community College.She was a member of the Arizona Commission on the Arts from 2006 to 2010....

    , If I Die in Juarez
  • Linda Gregg
    Linda Gregg
    Linda Alouise Gregg is an American poet.-Biography:Although born just miles northwest of New York City, Ms. Gregg grew up on the other side of the country, in Marin County, California. She received both her Bachelor of Arts, in 1967, and her Master of Arts, in 1972, from San Francisco State College...

    , All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems
  • Suheir Hammad
    Suheir Hammad
    Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian-American poet, author and political activist. She was born in Amman, Jordan. Her parents were Palestinian refugees who immigrated along with their daughter to Brooklyn, New York City when she was five years old...

    , Breaking Poems
  • Richard Holmes
    Richard Holmes
    Richard Holmes may refer to:* Richard Holmes , American actor* Richard Holmes , British biographer* Richard Holmes , British soldier and military historian...

    , The Age of Wonder
  • George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music
  • Patricia Santana
    Patricia Santana
    -Life:She is the eighth of nine children of Mexican immigrants. Her parents are from El Grullo, Jalisco.She graduated from University of California, San Diego, and from the University of California, Los Angeles with a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature....

    , Ghosts of El Grullo
  • Jack Spicer
    Jack Spicer
    Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...

    , My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi
    Peter Gizzi
    Peter Gizzi is an award-winning American poet and renowned editor of the American poet Jack Spicer. He attended Brown University, New York University and the State University of New York at Buffalo.-Life and career:...

     and Kevin Killian
    Kevin Killian
    Kevin Killian is an American poet, author, and playwright of primarily LGBT literature. He is also a highly regarded editor. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009...

  • Miguel Algarín
    Miguel Algarín
    Miguel Algarín , is a Puerto Rican poet, writer, co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café, and retired Rutgers University professor of English.-Early years:...

    , Lifetime Achievement Award


2010
  • Amiri Baraka
    Amiri Baraka
    Amiri Baraka , formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism...

    , Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music
  • Sherwin Bitsui
    Sherwin Bitsui
    Sherwin Bitsui is originally from Baaʼoogeedí , on the Navajo Nation. Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is Navajo of the Todichʼíiʼnii , born for the Tłʼízíłání ....

    , Flood Song
  • Nancy Carnevale
    Nancy Carnevale
    Nancy Carnevale is an assistant professor at Montclair State University, and winner of a 2010 American Book Award.She graduated from Rutgers University with a BA, from University of Michigan with an MA, and from Rutgers College with a PhD in US history....

    , A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States,1890-1945
  • Dave Eggers
    Dave Eggers
    Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is known for the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and for his more recent work as a screenwriter. He is also the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia.-Life:Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts,...

    , Zeitoun
  • Sesshu Foster
    Sesshu Foster
    Sesshu Foster is an American poet.He has taught composition and literature in East LA since 1985, and has also taught at the University of Iowa, the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Jack Kerouac School's Summer Writing Program.He was in residence...

    , World Ball Notebook
  • Stephen D. Gutierrez
    Stephen D. Gutierrez
    Stephen D. Gutierrez is an American short story writer, professor at California State University, East Bay, and winner of a 2010 American Book Award.He won the 2010 Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition....

    , Live from Fresno y Los
  • Victor Lavalle, Big Machine
  • François Mandeville, This Is What They Say (translated from the Chipewyan by Ron Scollon
    Ron Scollon
    Ron Scollon , was a professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of 16 books and over 80 articles on intercultural communication and discourse analysis, perhaps best known for his work in the area of interethnic communication between the Alaska Native and Asian...

    )
  • Bich Minh Nguyen
    Bich Minh Nguyen
    Bich Minh Nguyen is an American novelist. She won a 2010 American Book Award, for Short Girls.-Life:She immigrated with her family to Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1975....

    , Short Girls
  • Robin D.G. Kelley
    Robin D.G. Kelley
    Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is a professor of History and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. From 2003 to 2006 he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University...

    , Franklin Rosemont
    Franklin Rosemont
    Franklin Rosemont was a poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group...

    , Black,Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora
  • Jerome Rothenberg
    Jerome Rothenberg
    Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...

    , Jeffrey C. Robinson, Poems for the Millennium
  • Kathryn Waddell Takara
    Kathryn Waddell Takara
    Kathryn "Kay" Waddell Takara is an American poet. She won a 2010 American Book Award for Pacific Raven: Hawai`i Poems.- Professional background :...

    , Pacific Raven: Hawai`i Poems
  • Pamela Uschuk
    Pamela Uschuk
    Pamela Uschuk is an American poet, and Visiting Poet at University of Tennessee. She won a 2010 American Book Award, for Crazy Love: New Poems.She studied at Interlochen Arts Academy....

    , Crazy Love: New Poems
  • Katha Politt, Antarctic Traveller (Lifetime Achievement Award)
  • Quincy Troupe
    Quincy Troupe
    Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr., , is a poet, editor, journalist-Early life:The son of Negro League baseball catcher Quincy Trouppe , Troupe Jr. attended Grambling State University on a baseball scholarship...

    , The Architecture of Language (Lifetime Achievement Award)


Sources

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